Catch me if you can

Investigative journalism centres IRPI and CORRECT!V have launched a transnational investigation with the support of the Flanders Connect Continents Grant that touches 9 countries and involves 12 journalists, shading light on the drug trafficking managed by the Calabrian mafia, the ‘Ndrangheta. The series will be published on CORRECT!V website and on the media partners.

The first chapter of this series is an investigation onto Nicola Assisi, one of the most important cocaine brokers of our times, surely one of the most precious brokers to the ‘Ndrangheta, for which cocaine represent the primary source of richness.

Starting from the first steps he moved in Turin, which we could reconstruct thanks to the witness of the investigators who caught him in 1997, we describe Assisi’s world also with the most recent police operation, called Pinocchio, which tried to stop him again 18 years later.

The researches that IRPI conducted were collaborated by journalists from Portugal, Brazil, Peru and Paraguay and allowed us to find the traces Assisi and sons have left in Brazil – where they shake hands with the Primer Comando Capital (PCC), one of the most important drug cartels of Latin America.

The Assisis move virtually like ghosts: they use the rip-off technique to hide the drug loads, which allows them not to open import-export companies and leave no traces. However, to money launder they do have to open some business. We found a hint of it in Brazil, in a poor area of Sao Paolo where the Primer Comando Capital (PCC) is utterly strong.